Nile Ranger: ‘I’d still be playing in the Premier League if I had behaved’

Ranger’s promising career was almost over before it had even started.

He signed for Crystal Palace at the age of 10 but was released two years later for bad behaviour at school.

Aged 15, he was sentenced to 11 weeks in a young offenders’ institute for his part in an armed robbery in north London.

“We weren’t going around shooting or stabbing people,” he says. “We wanted to get some quick money so we said ‘let’s just take phones off people’.

“One of our entourage had a knife but I don’t know why because he wasn’t using it. We were acting like idiots.”

There is regret for the hurt he caused.

“Armed robbery is terrible. I wasn’t wanting to hurt them,” adds Ranger. “I was just thinking about getting the goods and running off.

“Now I’m older I do think I must have caused people trauma. At times I was a lunatic. I don’t know what else to call it.”

Ranger was a highly-promising £110-a-week player at Southampton’s academy when he was sentenced but the club supported him following his release and moved him into a flat with his mum, Karen, so she could keep an eye on him.

“My mum has had to come to meetings at every club I have been at to discuss my behaviour,” he says. “It’s been like that since my schooldays.”

Ranger was eventually kicked out of Southampton when he stole boots, training kit and even a staff member’s box of chocolates.

Where was his dad when all this was happening?

“He was around but I lived with my mum. Dad was in my life but what is he going to do? Punch me in the face? He could only speak to me.

“I’m my own man and he used to try to talk sense into me but I just didn’t listen.”

Ranger joined Swindon Town on trial before Newcastle came calling with a two-year contract and a £20,000 signing-on fee.

The 17-year-old headed to the north east hoping to put his troubled past behind him and make a name for himself playing alongside the likes of Fabricio Coloccini, Andy Carroll and Alan Smith.

“I went from nothing to something,” he says.